I want to try to gather up and focus the ministry of
these messages, taking you back to the beginning and
reminding you that we pointed out that the whole Bible,
in every part, is concerned with the will of God; which
means that, as the Bible is the Word of God, the will of
God is only to be found in the Word of God. Then we
pointed out that the Bible introduces God to us as a
'going' God, a God moving IN and WITH
purpose. He is in action from the first verse: "In
the beginning God created" (Genesis 1:1), and all
the way through the Bible He is seen to be pressing
onward in purpose and revealing Himself, and that
purpose, in His Word. So the Word of God has to govern
everything if the purpose of God is to be fulfilled and
completed.

We moved on to see that, in order to be in that full,
comprehensive will of God with purpose, it is necessary
for us to have no purpose of our own, and so we dwelt
upon the great law of spiritual progress - the law of
letting go; the law of renunciation of all unto God. We
mentioned three factors for a true beginning:

(1) That we are supremely concerned to know the will of
God;

(2) That we are quite prepared at least to listen to and
consider anything that might help us to know the will of
God, being open-hearted and open-minded

(3) That we are committed to do what the Lord shows us as
to that will.

That is the point at which we have now arrived, and, as I
have said, I want to gather all that up with one other
great essential to going on with God.

CAUGHT
UP IN THE GOINGS OF GOD

Let me say
this. In the presence of such a great deal of
misapprehension and inadequate understanding in the world
as to what Christianity is, I would say that Christianity
really is that persons are caught up in the goings of
God. The Apostle Paul used the word
"apprehended", and this is what he meant. He
had been apprehended of Christ, and Christ was going on,
moving forward - and how true that was at that time! In
the early days of the Book of the Acts it is so evident
that He was a forward-moving Christ. There was a great
forward movement from heaven, and this man was caught up,
and carried on in that going as one under arrest.

That is what Christianity is. It is not just a little
thing. It contains many things, but what it really
amounts to is that you and I have been caught up in
something; we have been taken hold of. There is a very
interesting word in the New Testament which is just this
very thing. It comes in the betrayal of Jesus, when the
band of people came out to arrest Him, and there is a
clause which says: "And they that had laid hold
of Jesus led him away" (Matthew 26:57). You can
see what kind of men they were! They were pretty tough,
and to be in their grasp and grip would certainly be
something that was not easy to resist. Again, it is the
same word as the Apostle Paul used when he said:
"The love of Christ CONSTRAINETH us" (2
Corinthians 5:14) and the word just means that we are
taken hold of and irresistibly carried on. There was the
woman who touched the hem of Jesus' garment for healing,
and He said: "Who is it that touched me?" The
disciples said: "Master, the multitudes PRESS
thee" (Luke 8:45). That, again, is the same word.
Have you ever been in a mob, a crowd, a multitude that is
GOING? There is plenty of that sort of thing
today! There is a rushing multitude, and when you get in
what can you do but go? It is no use trying to resist.
And Christianity is just being caught up in the eternal
going of the eternal God, in Christ, by the Holy Spirit,
and being mastered and irresistibly carried on.

I am very careful that you should get the point, for this
is a law of progress. That may seem very obvious, but we
need to see the principle of it.

You know the content of this Letter to the Hebrews. What
does it do right at the beginning? It gathers up
everything of all the goings of God. It gathers up all
the previous movements and goings of God - "God,
having of old time spoken unto the fathers in the
prophets by divers portions and in divers manners" -
and focuses them in His Son, Jesus Christ - "hath at
the end of these days spoken", not by bits and
pieces, not here and there, by divers portions and
manners, but focused, concentrated, consummated, fully
and finally, "IN HIS SON". Then the
writer goes on to tell us what Jesus Christ is, and Who
He is. This wonderful Christ that is being presented is
greater than all the angels, greater than the law,
greater than Moses, and greater than everything. Then the
writer uses the metaphor of a race, a going. We are
caught up in something as in a race, and what is it that
is governing this movement, this race, all this energy?
"Looking unto JESUS" - it is this
wonderful Jesus about whom he has been writing. He is the
full and consummate embodiment of Divine purpose into
which we are called and caught up.

What does this say to us? We have used a lot of words,
but what does it all mean?

Dear friends, it is a law, amongst the others, of GOING.
This Letter is full of phrases such as: 'Let us go on',
'let us leave the beginning and go on', 'let us... let
us... let us be caught up in something that makes us shed
every impeding, arresting and hindering thing.' What is
it that carries us on? We have seen the Lord Jesus! We
have had a vision, not objectively, perhaps, but
something has happened in our hearts and Jesus Christ has
become the all-mastering, all-controlling and
all-absorbing object of our existence. We have SEEN
Jesus, and that vision carries us on. What we have seen
about Him, what God's purpose is in Him, what we have
seen in Jesus has become a dynamic in our life, and such
a dynamic that nothing else matters. 'Let us lay aside
this', for this does not matter. 'Let us lay side that...
and that... and THAT', for they are not THE
thing. THIS is it - what we have seen of God's
will, in its fullness, as comprehended in His Son for us.
All that He is is for us.

THE
SIN THAT DOTH SO EASILY BESET US

You know,
we have not yet really grasped the Lord Jesus. I say that
meaningly and knowingly. Oh, how many of our worries
would go if only we had seen the Lord Jesus! How many of
those delaying, arresting things in our life would go if
only we had seen the Lord Jesus! What is it that is
holding us back? What is "the sin that doth so
easily beset us"? What is it that is slowing us in
the race, or even holding us up? 'Oh, this terrible
sinful thing that I am! This wretched man that I am! This
poor thing, so weak, sinful and faulty. I think about
this, I dwell upon that, and what happens? I stop
running! All the "go" goes out of my being!'

You stop and think about yourself for five minutes, and
see how fast you will run forward in the Lord! Oh, yes,
we all do it. We are overwhelmingly obsessed with this
terrible, poor, miserable thing that we are! We dwell
upon it, and then we flop down - and the race is at an
end for us while we are there. We have not seen the Lord
Jesus!

In Him we have been dismissed. In His death we have been
put out of sight. In Him risen we no longer appear before
God, for He appears for us as us. He is us. THAT
is seeing Jesus! If only we could get hold of that! If
only we could get hold of Him! If only our eyes really
did see what God has made Him to be for us - "Of him
are ye in Christ Jesus, who is made unto us wisdom from
God" (1 Corinthians 1:30). Not dwelling upon our own
foolishness and folly, but "unto us wisdom from God,
and righteousness, and sanctification, and
redemption." What more do you want? That comprehends
everything in redemption and unto glory! "Looking OFF
unto Jesus."

Do you see what I am trying to say? The writer of this
Letter to the Hebrews sees us as in a race and he says
that if we are going on in this we have to see Jesus, and
keep Him always in view; not by seeing ourselves and
other people all the time, but keeping our eye on Him.
Then we will keep going, but if we do not keep Him in
view, then we will stop going.

That is very plain, very simple, but it is the Gospel
concerning God's Son, Jesus Christ.

VISION
ESSENTIAL TO PROGRESS

You and I,
dear friends, individually, and if we belong to a company
of the Lord's people, that company, will only make
progress toward that full, ultimate end of God in Christ
if we have a spiritual vision of Jesus Christ. Vision is
essential to progress. Is it necessary for me to stay
with the word 'vision'? I am not thinking about something
objective that you see with your eyes of flesh. It is
something that has happened inside of you, and your inner
spiritual eyes have been opened. You can say: 'I have SEEN,
and that has revolutionised my life. That has put me on
my feet. That has set me on a course. That has become a
dynamic in my life which, IN SPITE OF MYSELF, keeps me
going.' Yes, thank God, it works like that. I know the
aspect, the factor, of our responsibility, but God help
you and me if it is all going to be left to our
responsibility and what we do! I tell you - and this may
have been your experience, or it may interpret your
present experience - many, many times I would have given
up the race. That is an awful confession! Indeed many
times I have given it up in my heart. It became so
difficult that I could go no further, so I gave up. It
was not, therefore, my persistence that enabled me to go
on, but what the Apostle calls "the power that
worketh in us". What is that? The Holy Spirit has
put a dynamic in us and we have seen. We cannot un-see!
We cannot go back. The seeing may fade, and it may even
be eclipsed by days of darkness and trouble. We may know
what Paul meant when he said: "We were pressed out
of measure, beyond our strength, insomuch that we
despaired even of life" (2 Corinthians 1:8). That
was a terrible thing for the greatest of all apostles to
say! What happened? Did Paul give up and say: 'Well, I
cannot go on!'? No, not at all! "The power that
worketh in us" got him on his feet again and again.
Let Elijah seek out his juniper tree and say: 'Take away
my life!', but the Lord does not agree. He has given
Elijah a part in his great, eternal purpose, and so he
will come up again.

Be encouraged! Are you down? Are you despondent? Are you
despairing? Are you feeling you cannot go on? You still
come up again, for something has taken place. I am
calling it 'vision', but that may be misleading. What I
mean is that something has come into our life which is a
spiritual knowledge and has become a spiritual dynamic,
giving us a sense of purpose, God's purpose. It is
something that God has done, and that is going to be the
secret of our survival, at least. But for that we will
not survive. We will not get through on any resource of
our own, but we will go on in the going as the eternal
goings of God if there has been this initial seeing of
God's purpose in Jesus Christ.

Oh, I do wish with all my heart that in the preaching of
the Gospel to the unsaved the note of eternal purpose was
more often struck! The Gospel is generally presented from
the point of view of what WE are going to get. The
appeal is to our souls, that we will have something that
will make us happy. That is the whole set-up: being
happy! Oh, you will not get much of a Christian by that
means, but you will if those who have come to the Lord
have come because they have seen something of the
greatness of Jesus Christ, and of their calling in Him;
if they have had this vision which has produced a sense
of vocation, a sense of mastering purpose. Without that
we will not get very far in the race! It is that which
the Apostle means, though he speaks in symbolic language.
Do not just dwell upon the literal idea. The spiritual
motivation is "looking off unto Jesus", who
started it and will finish it. He is the author, the
file-leader, and the perfecter. It did not begin with us,
thank God! How many times we have been rescued by that
word of the Lord Jesus: 'You did not choose Me. I chose
you. I initiated this thing and I will complete
it, if you will let Me, if you will fall into this going,
if you will keep your eye on Me, and off the things that
delay and arrest this vision' - or whatever word you may
use for the idea, the principle, the law, this something
that has taken hold of you, and you know it is that which
is carrying you on.

Have you got that? Are you a Christian of that sort? I am
not asking you if you had a Damascus Road experience,
when the whole thing was visual, ocular and sensational,
but whether something has happened so that, if you wanted
to put it into words, you would say: 'Well, I have come
to see Jesus Christ, and in Him my eternal destiny has
been bound up.' Do you see what I mean, what I am trying
to say? A mastering motivation has been brought into us,
and upon us, by Jesus Christ at the beginning that will
make us Christians that go on in this race with patience.
Have you got a mighty, Divine imperative in your life?

I wish I could get this home! After all your troubles,
trials, temptations and difficulties, are you prepared to
give up, to abandon everything and say: 'I am not going
on with this any longer!'? Well, sit down and try! I
venture to say that you will not get very far with that!
You may have two or three miserable days over it, but
sooner or later you will say: 'It is no use; I have to go
on!' That is what I mean by vision - this sense of a God
of purpose having laid hold of us to carry us on.

This is exactly what is meant by inspiration. The Lord's
people ought to be inspired people, which is only another
way of saying 'inspirited'. And, because of that, they
ought to be an inspiration to others. Oh, if we are not
an inspiration to others there is something seriously
lacking in the very nature of our Christianity! If we
cannot inspire others, if we cannot bring in inspiration
in our ministry and our contacts, in our leadership, then
that is a contradiction in terms, because the idea in the
Bible of leadership is inspiration, inspiring people. If
you are leading a meeting you ought to inspire people, in
whatever kind of meeting it is.

And what should be true of the individual should also be
true of every company. They should be a company of people
who are being carried on by this mighty Divine dynamic of
purpose, or vision. 'We KNOW where we stand. We KNOW
where we are going, and what we are after.' Many of the
Lord's people today do not seem to know where they are
going, or where they are. No assembly ought to be like
that! They ought to be a 'going' company and everybody
ought to know that those people have seen something and
are mastered by something that is carrying them on,
something that is a real force in their being.

VISION
ESSENTIAL FOR UNITY

Such a
vision has many side-effects and values, one of which is
the resolving of the whole question of unity. And what a
question that is! I hardly know what to say and what not
to say, for there is so much. Take up the first Letter to
the Corinthians and what have you there? People with
internal dissensions, divisions and quarrellings, and
anything but unity and oneness. Paul knew it well before
he went to them, and so he said: "I determined not
to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and him
crucified" (1 Corinthians 2:2). To him that was the
one all-unifying thing - a focused vision of Jesus Christ
and His Cross.

If you have this what I am calling 'vision', this
dominating sense of purpose and meaning given by the
Lord, it will resolve so much of this trouble manifested
in divisions and lack of real fellowship. A vision of
Jesus Christ is a unifying dynamic.

We go to the Old Testament for an illustration. Take the
case of Nehemiah. Well, Nehemiah had a vision. He was a
man of vision. He saw Jerusalem rebuilt, with the wall
reconstructed and made complete. He had a vision of this
new Jerusalem on the earth for that time, and he was a
man who was tremendously mastered by his vision. Then all
these poor people - and they were a bedraggled remnant! -
came back, with all the possibilities of more
disintegration, murmurings and quarrellings to hinder the
realization of this thing that had mastered this man. But
what? They shared his vision! They were gathered up into
it. They met persecution, opposition, and everything that
could deter them, but the verdict was: "The wall was
finished... in fifty and two days" (Nehemiah 6:15).
Why? Because the people had a mind to work. And what was
that mind? Well, it was this vision of the purpose which
had been put into the heart of this man and which unified
the people. Let the devil come alone and do everything
that he can to discourage and make difficulty! He even
tried the subtle ruse of trying to get Nehemiah to come
and have a conference in order to discuss things. 'No!'
said Nehemiah, 'Not on your life! I am doing a great work
and I will not come down there.' You see the power of a
mighty objective, a vision, to unify, to energise, to
keep going? Do we not need that? Does not Christianity
need that? Do we not need it in our assemblies? We do
indeed need something like that, so we must have this new
apprehension of God's purpose and will as centred in His
Son concerning us, a mighty, animating power in life that
is (as I have said and want to say again) more powerful
than all our capacity for giving up and being discouraged
and resigning. It is more powerful than all the
weaknesses of our own souls.

Oh, I do thank God for survival! That is a weak word, I
know. It is not enough to say that we survive, for we are
doing more than surviving, but in order to survive all
this that is against us, there must be something more
than ourselves. The Word says: "God is greater than
our heart" (1 John 3:20), and we have proved that
many times. Our hearts have fainted and well-nigh given
up the struggle, but He is greater than our hearts.

VISION
AN EMANCIPATING POWER

This thing,
call it vision or what you will - you know what it means
now! - is a mighty emancipating power. I use that word in
this sense: it is a great power for lifting us out of our
smallness, our narrowness, our littleness.

In illustrating this we will take up our good friend who
supplies us with so much instruction in this matter in
his own history, the Apostle Paul. You know, dear
friends, that the cause of the old Israel's calamity,
first of all of being sent into Babylon and captivity for
seventy years, and then eventually being dismissed by
God, was because of exclusiveness. There is no other
answer. 'We are THE people. The truth will die
with us. No one else has any place at all. We are it, and
only we are it. These nations, the Gentiles, are mere
dogs. There is no place for them in the Divine economy!
We are the chosen people, God's elect, and no one else.'
This was in spite of all the prophecies of what they were
meant by God to be to the Gentiles, to the nations. They
were to be the seed in which all the nations were to be
blessed, but in spite of that covenant with Abraham, they
had closed in on themselves until they were the alpha and
the omega, the beginning and the end. It was
exclusiveness, and Paul the Apostle was a representative
of that. He was born and brought up in that, trained in
it, imbibing it from his childhood. He was an embodiment
of that pharasaic exclusiveness. What are you going to do
with a man like that? Try argument, and see how far you
will get. He will out-argue you! Try persuasion. No, not
a bit of it! He is not the kind to be persuaded. He is a
bigot in this! Try persecutions. It makes no difference.
You will not move that man! He is shut in to this
exclusive position - but the thing is done. [Now] He is
emancipated, and the old Israel is no longer his parish.
The WORLD is his parish. How vast is the range of
his vision now! You cannot cope with his language about
this! He leaps over all language barriers because of
what? HE HAS SEEN JESUS CHRIST! He had a vision,
and not only has he seen Him in the incident of the
vision of a Person, but he has seen the significance. He
has seen what Jesus Christ means in God's universe, in
God's economy, in God's goings from eternity to eternity.
You cannot be exclusive if you have seen Jesus Christ!
That would dissipate and ruin all exclusiveness. You
cannot be mean, contemptible and small if you have seen
Jesus Christ!

Do you not agree with me when I say that this
presentation of Christ in His infinite greatness is the
only way to emancipate people from their littleness in
their spiritual life? Is that not needed today? Oh,
indeed it is! It is unifying, because we have one central
Object which draws us together and makes us say to about
one-thousand-and-one things that would hinder: 'You get
out of the way! We are set upon this purpose of God, and
we are going on.' It is unifying, emancipating and
enlarging. Oh, that the Lord would give us this
emancipation again, and enlarge us! The Psalmist says:
"I will run the way of thy commandments when thou
shalt enlarge my heart" (Psalm 119:32), and
enlargement of heart will make you fleet of foot in the
ways of the Lord.

VISION
THE GREAT BATTLEGROUND

Vision is
the great battleground of all time. Oh, if you have seen
you will be a marked person. If your eyes have been
opened you will know something of what that fellow knew
when the Lord opened those eyes that had been blind from
his birth. It is all so true to life! He had his eyes
opened and said: "Whereas I was blind, now I
see" (John 9:25). 'This one thing I know, and you
cannot rob me of that!' But it was not long before he was
excommunicated from the synagogue. He was cut off and
made an object of the Pharisees' spite.

That is true to spiritual experience. If you have seen
you are in the battle. You will not be troubled very much
by the devil if you have not got this dynamic in you,
because it is this dynamic which spells his final
overthrow. You have to count for God, and you only do so
by having seen; and when you have seen you are marked,
and there is a battle on. Anything to destroy you, to get
you out of the race and out of the battle will ensue!

How are we going to end? What are you praying? I will
tell you what I am praying! After all these years I am
praying with all my heart: 'Lord, reveal Thy Son in me
more than ever. Give me yet a larger apprehension and
comprehension of the meaning of Jesus Christ!' Will you
go and pray that? Will you seek the Lord continually that
He will enlarge and strengthen your apprehension of Jesus
Christ so that, figurative language or not, this is what
it is in actuality: 'Looking off unto Jesus, all that He
means, all that He contains, all that He represents of
God concerning us, the File-leader, the Perfecter, the
Completer, the Beginning and the End.' Pray that Christ
seen in the heart becomes this dominating power in our
lives which saves us from all that would bring us into
despair.